San Mateo / Burlingame waterfront — A Diked Lagoon, a Dead Racetrack Reborn, and a County Seat That Isn't Here

What Actually Makes San Mateo Different

San Mateo is not a beach town and not a small waterfront enclave -- it's a substantial, 105,661-resident Peninsula city (2020 Census) with a genuine bay-and-lagoon waterfront running alongside a much larger, denser inland city built around a 19th-century railroad stop. The town incorporated on September 3, 1894 by a 150-to-25 vote, and its identity was set early by the San Francisco and San Jose Railroad, which reached town in the early 1860s and cut travel time from San Francisco to roughly 37 minutes -- fast enough that wealthy San Franciscans began building summer and weekend estates here, a legacy still visible today in the San Mateo Park neighborhood's tree-canopied streets and in Central Park, whose Japanese Tea Garden was designed by a landscape architect with ties to Tokyo's Imperial Palace grounds. Downtown itself has been reshaped recently and deliberately: B Street became a car-free pedestrian mall in late 2021, and foot traffic there was reported up roughly 20% year-over-year in 2025-2026 coverage, alongside a Caltrain downtown station whose ridership reportedly doubled since 2023 to an average of about 1,658 riders a day in 2025.

A fact this page states plainly because it corrects a real, common misconception: San Mateo is not the county seat of San Mateo County. Despite sharing the county's name and holding one of its largest populations, the county seat is Redwood City, a few miles south, established as such when the county was formed in 1856 -- county courts, the county assessor's central offices, and county government sit in Redwood City, not in San Mateo proper. It's an easy assumption to make and an easy one to get wrong before a purchase, so this page names it directly rather than letting the shared name imply something that isn't true. San Mateo's own real distinguishing status is different but still real: it is a substantially larger city than its immediate northern neighbor, Burlingame -- roughly 105,661 residents against Burlingame's roughly 31,868 as of recent estimates, more than three times the population -- and it carries a denser, more varied economic and housing base than the smaller, more uniformly residential city just across its northern border. Buyers researching "San Mateo waterfront" and buyers researching "Burlingame waterfront" are looking at genuinely different-sized, differently-positioned cities that happen to share a border, not two names for the same place.

San Mateo's waterfront identity runs through two genuinely distinct water features. Marina Lagoon is an inland, diked and dredged tidal slough -- a remnant of what was Seal Slough before 1952 engineering converted it into an enclosed estuary that today serves double duty as the city's central flood-control basin and as a four-mile network of protected inland waterway supporting sailing, rowing, swimming, powerboating, and water-skiing, with Parkside Aquatic Park and Bayside Park lining its shores. Ryder Park, by contrast, sits directly on open San Francisco Bay, with a boardwalk along the Bay Marshes, access to the regional Bay Trail, and wildlife viewing that includes the endangered California Ridgway's rail (formerly known as the California clapper rail) in the adjacent tidal marsh. A few miles north, just outside San Mateo's own city limits, Coyote Point Recreation Area -- a roughly 670-acre San Mateo County park with its own marina (425 wet berths, operating continuously for nearly sixty years), a public beach, and the CuriOdyssey science museum and zoo -- functions as the broader area's most-used bayfront recreation hub, and this page names it as a county facility near San Mateo rather than claiming it as a city-owned amenity.

The single most significant land-use story tied to this city is Bay Meadows. Bay Meadows Racecourse opened November 13, 1934 and operated continuously for nearly 74 years as the longest continually running thoroughbred racetrack in California, until the California Horse Racing Board's 2006 mandate that all state tracks switch from dirt to synthetic racing surfaces -- a conversion track owner Magna Entertainment said would cost $7 million to $10 million -- led to the track's permanent closure on August 17, 2008, after a one-year exemption in 2007 failed to produce a different outcome. The San Mateo City Council had already approved redevelopment plans in 2005, and what exists on the site today is the roughly 83-acre Bay Meadows Urban Village: about 1,000 residential units, some 780,000 square feet of office space, 40,000 square feet of retail, and 18 acres of public parks, built directly adjacent to the Hillsdale Caltrain station and led by developer Wilson Meany. The area's single biggest current tenant is Roblox Corporation, whose headquarters now occupies more than a million square feet across the campus -- with a 2026 pre-lease of an additional 325,000 square feet for buildings expected to complete around 2029 -- turning a shuttered racetrack into one of the Peninsula's more significant corporate campuses within less than two decades of the last race being run.

A few things this research could not resolve to one clean, confirmed figure and does not invent: a single citywide median home price, given how sharply San Mateo's own neighborhoods diverge (Downtown San Mateo condo prices running roughly $870,000 in one recent snapshot against San Mateo Park single-family homes running roughly $4.5 million in the same period); a single combined sales tax rate, since aggregator sites disagreed noticeably on San Mateo's specific special-district add-ons; and a precise current liquefaction-zone boundary for any individual Marina Lagoon-area parcel, which requires a parcel-specific lookup rather than a citywide generalization. Confirm current numbers directly with the City of San Mateo, the San Mateo County Assessor-County Clerk-Recorder, and a local buyer's agent before making a purchase or relocation decision.